Allan David Bloom Quotes

The specific effect of the MBA has been an explosion of enrollments in economics, the prebusiness major. The prebusiness economics major is not motivated by love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned with. There is nothing else quite like this perfect coincidence between science and cupidity elsewhere in the university.

Allan David Bloom

True liberal education requires that the students whole life be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his action, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation. Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything.

Allan David Bloom

The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded. ... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.

Allan David Bloom

Some political scientists, for example, say that the Economic Man may be very nice for playing games with but that he is an abstraction who does not exist, while Hitler and Stalin are real and not to be played with. Economic analysis, they say, not only does not help us to understand such political actors but makes it more difficult to bring them within the purview of social science by systematically excluding or deforming their specific motives. Economists, seeking mathematical convenience, turn us away from the consideration of the most important social phenomena.

Allan David Bloom

The issue is what is the social science atom.

Allan David Bloom

Economics has its own simple built-in psychology, and that provided by the science of psychology flatly contradicts the primacy of the motives alleged by economics.

Allan David Bloom

Man is the problem, and we live with various stratagems for not facing it.

Allan David Bloom

Social science and humanities have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

Allan David Bloom

The university has lost whatever polis-like character it had and has become like the ship on which the passengers are just accidental fellow travelers soon to disembark and go their separate ways. The relations between natural science, social science and humanities are purely administrative and have no substantial intellectual content.

Allan David Bloom

It is amazing how many undergraduates are poking around for courses to take, without any plan or question to ask, just filling up their college years. In fact, with rare exceptions, the courses are parts of specialties and not designed for general cultivation, or to investigate questions important for human beings as such. The so-called knowledge explosion and increasing specialization have not filled up the college years but emptied them. Those years are impediments; one wants to get beyond them. And in general the persons one finds in the professions need not have gone to college, if one is to judge by their tastes, their fund of learning or their interests.

Allan David Bloom

Todays student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn.

Allan David Bloom

The practical effects of unwillingness to think positively about the contents of a liberal education are, on the one hand, to ensure that all the vulgarities of the world outside the university will flourish within it, and, on the other, to impose a much harsher and more illiberal necessity on the studentthe one given by the imperial and imperious demands of the specialized disciplines unfiltered by unifying thought.

Allan David Bloom

The strength of his soul is a result of the part of it that makes him proud and ambitious, that seeks an autonomy not dependent on others opinions or wills.

Allan David Bloom

The fact-value distinction admits that values are essential to life and shape the way facts are seen and used. Therefore values are primary. And if they do not come from reason, then they come from passionate commitment, the essence of morality. Of course, since commitment did not really produce values, the values adopted were the remnants of old reasoning, values with fallen arches, reaffirmed by claims of passionate commitment.

Allan David Bloom

Such groups abandoned merely formal freedom to support substantive causes.